


Star Gazing

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: All Human, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will and Jem all-human fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, people who tell me my Heronstairs is too angsty, have some cute fluffy happy boys falling in love then. 
> 
> No bleeding to death, no drugs, no oppressive Clave governments, no Victorian restrictions ruining everything.

James Carstairs had spent the last two months in China visiting his grandparents and reconnecting with his roots. His mother had been adamant that the trip happen before he moved away to school. He had enjoyed the trip. He had realized that he didn’t know Mandarin nearly as well as he thought he did and his Shanghainese was non-existent. Still it had been nice to meet cousins who had never been more than pictures on his Facebook feed. Still he was glad to be back even if only for two weeks. University was coming. He wasn’t so much unpacking his bags as repacking them before he left the sleepy little town and moved to the city.

He was in the middle of that process when his phone buzzed.

“knock knock motherfucker” the screen said.

He went to the window and looked down at the driveway. A black car - a third hand sports car that he knew had a ding in the roof - sat in front of his house and a figure sat on top of it. He smiled down at him and left his half packed suitcases strewn across his room. He took the stairs two at a time and showed his mother that he had a sweater before he said, “See you before midnight!” because that was the rule. She waved without looking up. 17 years of excellent behaviour had bought him the leeway to just leave the house at a dead run every once and awhile.

Outside, Will slid down off the roof of his beat up car and grinned in the light of the street lamp. He was tall and wore a pair of battered khaki shorts and a t-shirt with a band name on the front. His hair was a mess of ink black curls. Jem had thought he'd have to wait until tomorrow to find him and to have him here at his door was the best coming home gift he could have received.

“Jem, how was Beijing?” Will asked in an almost formal tone. No one else called him Jem. He was always James or sometimes Jian Ming if he was in trouble.

They had met when Jem had moved to town at eleven following his father’s death. Will had been the kid who sat beside him and had been assigned to help him navigate the school. During a group project Will had tried to call him Jimmy as a joke. It hadn't gone well. There had been death threats and Will had gone looking for a new nickname. Jem was apparently an old fashioned British short form for James. This was something he took on faith because if there was some strange quirk of British history, Will probably knew it. The only thing he read more of than novels was books on history.

“Shanghai,” he corrected as he threw his arms around Will.

Will pulled him into a hug that was just over the line from appropriately friendly. They’d been skirting the line between friends and something else since a New Year’s party that had ended with them curled up in one another’s arms behind the sofa in Jessamine Lovelace’s basement. Jem could still remember waking to Will’s breathing against his neck andit haunted him sometimes. He would wake up feeling like something was missing because the warmth of Will's body wasn’t there.

“There’s a meteor shower tonight,” Will said. Jem immediately looked up but there wasn’t anything to see against the bright light of the street lamps that lined the road. Will was still standing too close and Jem looked back at him.

“We won’t be able to see it here,” Jem said.

“I’ve got all kinds of food you can’t get in China and a bottle of wine I borrowed from my dad,” Will said, “Let’s go out to the bluffs.”

“I’ve missed you and your mad schemes,” Jem said.

“I’ve just missed you,” Will said and he leaned in so Jem could feel his breath on his ear as he spoke. It brought back such a strong sense memory of that night at the party that he was a little surprised that Will’s legs weren’t tangled with his and there was so much space between the two of them.

Will caught his expression and grinned but didn’t say anything. This is how it went. They would come up to the edge and one of them would back out before it could start. Jem had been the one to back away more than once but tonight it was Will who turned and scampered over to the driver’s side.

Jem slid into the passenger’s seat and the car was almost more familiar than his own house had been. He was truly home if he was surrounded by the smell of that stupid air freshener and Will’s aftershave and the almost ignorable gym bag somewhere in the back seat. Jem rolled down the window and smiled at Will as he pulled away from the curb and they headed out of town.

Will drove fast and they kept the music loud. The wind whipped in through the open windows and brought the smells of late summer with it. Cut grass and dry earth and somewhere not to far away a whiff of woodsmoke. Jem shook the hair of his eyes when the wind pushed it over his face and he stared out at the shapes of trees and the little spots of light marking houses as they flew by.

He watched the scenery and when he thought he wouldn't get caught, he watched Will in the dull light of the car. He had long fingers and his movements were always graceful even when he was just fiddling with the radio to skip a song he didn’t like. Will was a history buff who knew the hills around town like the back of his hand. His mother had grown up on this land and taken him and his sisters hiking throughout their childhoods. Jem didn't even stop to consider that he should ask where they were going. Where ever it was, it would be good.

Will was his best friend and one of the least predictable people he knew. He had flirted his way through his teenage years but never dated seriously. He always had an invite to a party but that never stopped him from quoting obscure poets or disappearing into his head for hours at a time. Jem knew that if he started opening compartments and bags he would find three notebooks within easy reach. Will liked to scribble down everything - poetry or lyrics or just a phrase he found funny - he had hundreds of pages of words.

Jem knew him better than he knew anyone else and Jem didn't think anyone knew him like Will did. It should have been easy to say the three little words that sat in his mouth when they were together like this but they would never come out. He opened his mouth to say it but the song changed and Will glanced his way as he checked his blind spot for a turn and his nerve fled.


	2. Chapter 2

There were two paths leading up the bluffs and Will bypassed them both and parked not in one of the lit and signed lots where all the other sky gazers were but on the side of the road. Jem was an urban kid. He didn’t trust forests. He tried to take solace in the fact that Will was confident about where they were and where they were going. He tossed Jem a blanket and a flashlight and gathered up a backpack full of food before setting off into the trees.

Jem hesitated for just a moment but Will yelled back and insult about “city slickers” and he turned on his light and followed Will’s little spot of brightness into the shadows. Faith and bravado against the rustle that was probably squirrels and not wolves.

They climbed up a snaking path that led the way to the top of the bluffs. It wasn’t a wide paved space with a railing and benches like the spot down to the west where they could pick out the lights of everyone else. The crowd who had come out to see the meteor shower that night seemed like they belonged to another world. This was a small clearing that broke off down to the water in a sheer drop. They were higher than everyone else. They were at the top of the world. Jem inched a little closer to the edge and Will grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

“There are loose rocks and I don’t know where they are in the dark,” Will told him. They retreated to a patch of grass just outside the trees and spread out the blanket. Jem laid down immediately and looked up. Will was opening up his bag of snacks but he stopped and came to join him.

He lay down so their shoulders touched and their heads were close together and Jem shifted his head so that he could feel Will’s curls against his temple. The sky was a tapestry. Clear and bright and full of stars. When he saw the first one fall he reached out to grab Will’s wrist to point it out.

“If it’s a meteor shower do you get a wish?” Will asked in a tone of voice that made it sound like he truly cared about the semantics of wish granting. Jem was about to answer him but Will distracted him by adjusting their hands so that he could hold on. Jem squeezed his hand in encouragement but didn’t look at him. Looking at him would be too much.

“Only on the first one,” Jem said as though he was sure of the rules. Will pointed out another squeezing Jem’s hand to get his attention while he pointed. Jem missed the meteor entirely. He had to gather his attention back together so he could ask, “What would you wish for?”

“If you tell it won’t come true,” Will told him sounding indignant that he would even suggest breaking such a sacred magic as wishing on stars. Jem laughed and looked for another. He held onto Will’s hand, this little tether to the thing that hovered just outside the normal lines of their friendship.

“What if I wished for wine and British snacks?” Jem asked.

“That’s an exception,” Will said and he let go of Jem’s hand to roll away and grab the backpack. Jem stayed staring at the sky as a pair of meteors shot past above his head and dwindled at almost exactly the same time. He sat up and looked at Will who had poured red wine into a pair of plastic cups and passed one to Jem without looking.

A moment later, Will turned to him and raised his own cup, “Here’s to new beginnings,” he said.

The plastic didn’t clink but they pretended that they did and took a sip of the wine. Jem wasn’t a fan of wine but this one was sweet enough and rich enough to balance out the bitterness. He took another drink and smiled down at the the cup. The liquid was dark against the white of the plastic but the colour was invisible in such limited light. He looked up again and Will was watching him.

He was starting to say something and then giving up on it over and over again. Jem reached out a hand and held it palm up. Will lined his up and they were almost exactly the same size. Jem laced their fingers and smiled in what he hoped was an open and encouraging way. Say it, please say it because I can’t, he thought as loudly as he could.

“I missed you so much,” Will said which wasn’t quite what he wanted to hear but it was good enough.

“It’s good to be back here,” Jem said and tightened his hold on Will’s fingers. He couldn’t even say this and he felt like a coward so he tried again, “I missed you every day, next time I’m bringing you with me.”

“Two weeks from now you leave for uni,” Will said.

“So do you,” Jem said but he understood what he meant. He sighed, “Oxford’s not so far away.”

“Yeah it is,” Will said, “But it doesn’t matter. I didn’t take it. I never really wanted to go to Oxford. Family legacy be damned. My grandfather nearly threw a fit over it. I’m going to LSE. History and Government so at least he can imagine me becoming an MP instead of a dreaded English teacher.”

Jem dropped his head to hide his smile. He put his drink down and took Will’s and put that down as well and then threw his arms around him. Will laughed and pressed his face into the crook of Jem’s neck, another memory for him to call up when he was alone. He turned his face into Will’s hair because if this memory was going to haunt him he wanted it to be as good as it could get. Will’s hair was warm and smelled like night air and shampoo and something indefinably Will.

Jem had a spot at the Royal College of Music that he had fought for through rounds of auditions and applications and wasn’t prepared to give up for anything. He was looking forward to moving to the city but it wasn’t until Will told him that he as coming too that he realized how much he hated the idea of moving there alone. The London School of Economics wasn’t that far on the tube. He laughed and pulled Will in a little closer.

This wasn’t the two week countdown to losing him that Jem had feared it was. He had fought his mother on the timing of the China trip because it would mean losing his last summer with Will. He had made excuses about working and building up his savings. He had tried to explain it away as needing to prepare for the level of skill he would be expected to maintain once he started at the Royal College.

Nothing had worked because there was a solution to everything and Wen Yu Carstairs was very good at solutions. But the true problem wasn’t solvable with practice schedules or budgets. The true problem was that those two months were supposed to belong to Will and instead she had given them to Shanghai and cousins and showing Jem where he had been born.

But now London loomed not as some place to go alone but someplace to explore with Will. With Will’s hair against his cheek he could imagine it. The halls and the libraries and Will reading books bigger than his head while Jem worked out musical theory problems beside him. They could get lost on the tube together and find new places together and argue over movies like they always did.

Will untangled himself as the hug was crossing that line and Jem let him go though a part of him wanted to grab his shirt and pull him back. Another part of him whispered that he shouldn’t risk it if they were moving to the city together. Just be friends. Being friends had been perfect for so long, why risk it now?

Will took another drink of wine and then dug into his bag and passed Jem a pack of crisps. He laughed and threw them back. They bounced off the side of Will’s head even in the dark.

“Authentic British cuisine, that is,” Will said and Jem shook his head at him. He would drag someone all the way up to the bluffs to make a joke like that. He did pull Will in then before he could pull some horrible processed snack cake out of his bag. Will let himself be dragged away and settled in close to Jem and put his head his shoulder and looked up at the sky again.

They sat like that tilted together while they drank their wine and watched the stars fall. 


	3. Chapter 3

Will finished his wine and smiled at the person beside him. He had his arm behind, but not quite around Jem who was genuinely watching the sky and smiling each time he caught sight of a meteor. Will cared about astronomy about as much as he cared about the social life of bread-mold but it had seemed like the type of thing that Jem would like. Stars were beautiful and Jem liked beautiful things. He liked to imagine the world as bigger and deeper and stranger than most people saw it. He was the type of person who found magic in rain storms and broken radios that could only get in the oldies station.

"It's like it's trapped in the past. It can't move forward so it holds onto the songs it remembers," Jem had said about the radio. They'd been thirteen and exploring Will's attic and going through all the old things up there. Will liked poetry, even then he had liked poetry. He read poetry but Jem somehow always managed to see poetry in the world around them.

Will leaned a little closer because every time he did Jem responded. He imagined that Jem returned his little overtures all the time but tonight he had convinced himself that it wasn't imagination. Tonight it seemed like Jem was just as happy to have their hands linked together as he was. The way he'd run down the steps to throw his arms around Will's neck, the way he'd held on when Will had taken his hand, those weren't things he had imagined.

He hoped.

Will had nursed this crush for years.

At first because he couldn't admit to his interest and then because he was sure it was a one way feeling. Then half-drunk at a party, he'd found Jem hiding behind a sofa, reading. He hated parties and only came if Will insisted and promised not to abandon him. He had sunk down and apologized for leaving him alone and Jem had put his arm around his shoulder in a perfectly friendly way.

Will, in his infinite ability to make everything worse, had rolled into him and fallen asleep with his head on Jem's shoulder. Rather than waking up alone, he had woken up on the floor with Jem's fingers in his hair and his head cradled into Jem's chest like it belonged there.

The crush had become bigger and deeper and more distracting from that night. For months he had to remind himself to breathe when Jem touched him. Jem didn't warm up to most people but once he did he had all sorts of little physical quirks. He grabbed Will's arm when he wanted to make a point. During study sessions he liked to lean in so that they were shoulder to shoulder and Will could feel the warmth of him through their clothing. When Jem jokingly shoved him into a locker because he was teasing, his heart rate picked up like it was something far more intimate.

Will's experience with things that might be considered more intimate was limited and not particularly the stuff of romance novels and love poems. Tonight was romance novels and love poems all very carefully portrayed as "just hanging out" so that his heart didn't have to get broken.

Jem looked over while Will was in the midst of a bout of staring and he thanked every falling star that it was too dark for it to be obvious that he was blushing. He still dropped his gaze to the empty cup in his hands. He refilled it just to have something to do and passed Jem whatever was on the top of the back, a chocolate bar of some kind.

"Tell me a secret," Jem said as he opened it.

And there it was. The invitation. The moment when he could say it.

Will looked at him and tried to gauge his expression in the dark. It was impossible. His imagination filled in the details that the night hid: brown eyes so deep they were almost black, hair like ink, delicate arches and strong lines and an expressive mouth. Thinking about Jem's mouth was a black hole into which Will could not afford to fall while he was sitting in front of him.

"I think about that Jessie's party far too often," his mouth said without his mind's consent. He snapped his jaw shut. Jem was going to break his heart. It would be gentle and careful as he laid all the little pieces down on the ground. He would be careful as he gingerly stepped around those shards as they tried to continue being friends.

Jem was quiet for a long time and Will started scrambling for something that would brush away the obvious implications of that comment. Jem still said nothing but he turned in closer so his mouth was right beside Will's throat. Will almost managed to stay still and prevent a horrendous faux pas but then Jem touched him. He was too distracted by the shiver that ran to his toes and his fingertips to say if it was lips or cheek or nose but it was right below his jaw.

"You passed out with your mouth right about here," Jem said and he sounded a little unsteady like he was as nervous as Will was. Will said nothing because he had - for the first time in his life - forgotten how to assemble sounds into words. Jem continued, "You didn't even smell like booze, you just smelled like you and you held on like a little kid having a nightmare. You had a fist full of my shirt even after you'd fallen asleep. It was like you scared I would leave you. I think about it too much too."

Will reached up hesitantly and brushed his fingers over Jem's hair. This had been the first thought he'd had that made him start to realize that he had feelings that weren't just friendly. They had been fifteen and Jem's hair had been too long because he was going through a careful rebellious stage. Will had found himself with the urge to run his fingers through it. He expected it to be a one time thought but it never went away. It didn't matter that Jem sometimes cut it short. Once the urge had popped into his head, it clung on. He had never done it no matter how much he thought about it. There were no normal pretexts one could manufacture to play with someone else's hair.

Jem had been hovering and as Will got bolder he rested his forehead against Will's neck and his cheek against his shoulder. Will ran just his fingertips over Jem's hair and then threaded it between his fingers. Soft and pin straight, it was strands of silk. He threaded his fingers through it and Jem sighed like he had received a last minute reprieve from some terrible fate. It was just a release of air but it was contented and relaxed. Will was smiling and it wouldn't go away.

"I always misread you," Jem said.

"You don't, you see me better than everyone else," Will said.

Jem sat up and looked Will in the eye. In the dark he was just a collection of shadows against the dark of the forest behind them. He was close and intense. If there had been no light in the world, Will would have been able to feel the intensity.

Will hesitated again. Jem with his head down was a fantasy but Jem looking at him was a person. A complicated unpredictable person. Jem tilted his head just a bit, a little inquisitive bird. When he'd been young and scrawny, he had looked bird-like when he tilted his head like that. It was a hold over of the child Will had first met and it made him braver.

Jem would not thank him for thinking of him as a baby bird even when he was eleven years old. And yet, that memory of feeling protective of the new kid came back. Jem had been small and unusual with his accent and his carefulness and remembering him like that stripped away the last of Will's doubts. He ran his fingers over the near invisible lines of Jem's face and felt the smile even though he couldn't see it.

“Can I kiss you?” Jem asked. It was sweet and hesitant and he was so close when he said it and protectiveness rolled through Will.

“Yes please,” he said which seemed like the wrong thing to say to that request especially when it came out just a little bit desperate. He added in a whisper, “Always.”

Jem tasted like chocolate when he leaned in and pressed his lips to Will's. It was a gentle kiss because Jem was gentle and careful with everything that mattered to him. Will had to drop his hands and grab hold of the blanket they sat on so he didn't ruin the gentle kiss by grabbing hold of him. He was tentative but not shy and he kept smiling.

Tiny fleeting smiles that Will felt against his mouth. Jem smiled before he kissed a little harder. He smiled when Will shifted and his lips found his cheek. A smile when he turned Will’s face back with fingers on his chin. When Will kissed back and Jem’s lips parted just a fraction, there was a smile there too.

Will followed him when he pulled back and kissed him one more time before Jem reached up to touch his hair and run his hands down to Will's neck. Jem held him and pressed their foreheads together. Will's mind ran over love poems and romance novels and thought for the first time that perhaps reality had outshone anything fiction had to offer.


End file.
